A Life Change

I burst out the door. A new life! A new life! I couldn’t get to the car fast enough. The sun slammed into the ground. That tired old company with its dirty tables, dirty warehouse, dirty plastic injection molding machines in a filthy factory was over. They had lost customers and they have shoved me and most of the rest of the staff and workers out the door.

Blessed was that moment. Was it a depression that waited for me I get to get through this mania with all its miseries. In a few weeks, I would be in Croatia writing reports for the Internet about peace groups and what I saw of the war. Enforced sadness in those days to come, a public face to hide the exuberance that came with having a new passport, money for a train-ticket, and a thousand dollars of traveler’s checks in a country where life was cheap. I was unemployed as far as the state was concerned but I was laughing at all the people who stayed behind in those filthy factories of the South Bay. They could have the dirt, bury themselves in it if that was their wont. I would never go back.

I made my break clean and complete. They could have it all. I wanted no references, no memories of it. No more applications. No more enduring the micromanagement of a boss. Then beyond all this rabid exuberance — the crash.